TROUBL

I spent Saturday at the Three Points Ranch, just outside of Marble Falls, TX, for a wedding ceremony. Evan, a college friend of my wife’s, was getting married to his boyfriend, Addison. They’re both Manhattanites, upwardly-mobile members of a social class I rarely spend time with. The ceremony was conducted in Texas, as that’s where both of their families hail from, but the actual wedding papers, by law, were to be filed in Massachusetts–except the day before the wedding, Connecticut ruled that gay folks could get married in their state, saving them a trip further north.

It made for some interesting table-talk at the reception, let me tell you. My wife and I sat with six well-dressed, well-coifed men, all couples, as well as an elderly uncle, a widower who wore his cowboy hat, boots, and belt buckle emblazoned with the words right to bear arms without a trace of irony.

So, where are you from? I asked the dude sitting next to me.

Memphis, he said. Originally, Memphis. I live in New York now.

Ooh, Tennessee? a young fella across the table said. Have you been to Dollywood?

The rest of the table looked at him with stark interest, and he nodded profusely. Only four times! He laughed.

Oh, god, I want to go so bad, the man seated next to my wife said, his voice thick with an Australian accent. I just love her.

I kicked my wife under the table, delighted to have a stereotype as innocuous as a group of gay men’s devotion to Dolly Parton validated, when the old cowboy spoke. That woman is a national treasure, he said with a thick West Texas drawl, something like Couch Taylor on Friday Night Lights mixed with a hint of Sam Elliott.

I turned to the guy who started this, the one from Tennessee, aware that the novelty of this conversation would quickly wear off. Enough about Dolly Parton, I implored, what do you think of the Titans this year?

Oh my god, they’re so good, he squealed, we’re going all the way this year. Definitely.

No way, his boyfriend shook his head. It’s a Giants repeat!

At this point, the old Texan glared at the young gay Manhattan socialite. Now boy, he said, there are some things that just aren’t okay in Texas.

My wife tried desperately to steer the topic of conversation back to divas, even bringing up the fact that she briefly met Madonna at a theatre in London earlier in the year, but it was no use. This was football season, and we were all American men. We were lucky that the shouting match over Vince Young, Eli Manning, and Tony Romo didn’t end up coming to blows.

[something to celebrate] After the cake was cut, my wife approached the old cowboy to ask what he thought of the ceremony.

I got choked up, he said. I don’t usually get teary at weddings, but this was something. I never saw nobody get “gay-married” before.

And it was strange, watching these two people celebrate a powerful, touching milestone in their lives together as a vastly disparate group of family and friends cheered them on… only to realize that it’s actually illegal.

It’s fucked up, and we’ve all known that it’s fucked up for some time, but it didn’t connect with me until I saw firsthand what a joyous occasion it was for everybody involved, from aged West Texans to young Manhattan hipsters, realizing that the very thing we were all celebrating was illegal for no goddamn reason. But it wasn’t political, not that Saturday. It was just a Good Thing.

It was the last good thing there was.

[then, on sunday...] Lord, fuck the NFL. Every one of us gathered around the televisions in the ranch the following day, straining to catch updates on our various games, had our hearts broken. Whether it was my pathetic Chicago Bears giving up a hard-earned single point lead after a kickoff with eleven seconds on the clock, or the Dallas Cowboys getting clobbered by the Arizona Cardinals in overtime, or the Redskins coughing up blood and allowing the Rams to claim their first win of the season, football looks like a dire game to follow this year.

Yeah, the parity the league is based upon works, but that sure equals a lot of broken hearts on Sunday. Monday, too–as of this writing, the miserable Cleveland Browns are two minutes away from claiming victory over the undefeated New York Giants. Of the 14 games played this week, five of them were decided within the final thirty seconds of play. And every heavy-hitter favorite in the league, from the Giants and the Cowboys and the Redskins to the Brady-less Patriots, went down to a team they had no business losing to. When they say any given Sunday, what they’re really talking about was October 12, 2008.

It was a rough weekend, with the stuffing showing through the shoulder pads of even the mightiest names in the game–we learned that Peyton Manning had a secret second surgery, that Tony Romo would be out for at least a month with a broken pinky, that Adrian Peterson could be contained by a team as godawful as the fucking Detroit Lions, that Brian Urlacher and Lance Briggs could be made to look like goddamn college ballplayers against Matt Ryan… All of which means that any attempt to define the power rankings in the NFL right now is pointless. No one has any idea how good anybody is. Right now, it looks like Tennessee and Indianapolis will make a run for the AFC title in January, while New York and Tampa battle it out to represent the NFC, but who the hell knows? Any team not based in Cincinnati or Detroit has at least a 50/50 shot of winning the Super Bowl right now. Hell, Kansas City and St. Louis have both proven their ability to win games, so long as they’re up against good teams–a few lucky turns and you could see an all-Missouri Super Bowl!

We fled the ranch to head back to Austin before Sunday night’s embarrassing match-up between the Patriots and the Chargers–Loser Bowl ‘08, a grotesque, Bizarro-world parody of last year’s AFC Championship Game. The fake New England Patriots lost by 20 to the fake San Diego Chargers, but I was not there to see it. It’s for the best–the occasion was meant to be joyous, if illegal. But think for a second how fucked-up that is: It’s goddamn criminal for two dudes to get married, but there’s no legislation that would outlaw a week of football as shitty as Week 6 of the 2008 NFL season?